They teem in the streets, cordonedoff, starentranceside to the world; everywhere they’re rejoicing, horaing amid the shir: Oy vey can you see…no, I can’t, to tell you the truth, this veil, not over their hats, down in front, stay low; their mouths open wide to the niggun of a new day, they’re dancing in odd hobbled circles, closing in, tripwidening out again, wielding weapons of banners and bunting, beating their sandwichboards into placards, signs ’n’ wonders, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, their krazy kinderlach enjoying their appetitespoiling, dentitiondestructive kosher treats vended only in extendo familysize, lining around the impromptu stands and kiosks and carts and booths to purchase their merchandise, gleaning swag (not only the Gardengenuine, not merely the Islandapproved, but everything, the illicit imitation, the violate, knockoffs themselves knocked off the block, curbside vendors hocking the bogus, get your chimeric, the false of the false); purchases later they’re ready to wearing their own, above it souvenir yarmulkes, under it souvenir scapulars, which are tzitzit, phylacteries, too, tefilin, false noses and flossy beards, and so who knows if it even is Him up there waving and smiling and with arms held far out in front of Him with palms flat deficiently applauding their fizzy applause, and shvitzing, too, in this bare chill — how much they pay for His shvitz, who’s the seller, let’s have his papers: Metro Gestapo standing immovably at the sidelines, simcha security leaning up against the shuttered storefronts that line the parade routes, the limits of audience muster, standing sentry, as well, atop the 42nd Street mound, the makeshift Tel of paraphernalia profane now purposed into barricades and cordons crosstown (a spontaneous mountain, every lick of height lacked by Sinai this heap of treyf pots and pans, crucifixi strangled with the snakes of the rosary, value leather barcaloungers, kneelers and falds, robes and stoles); portapotties runnethover, traffic is stalled to the tushes of tunnels, constipated, congested; the streets are paved a hazard with papers crushed, crumpled: snowballs, the windfall of potholes; there aren’t enough trashcans, any there are have been like the courts overturned, without street sense or order. Dogs are hanged from the clotheslines, pinned above alleys that echo their barks with the gusts. Media personalities pass mics around headed in filter with frothing black clouds; flashes pop off like suns then fall through the night, smoky doves. As more and more people they keep crowding into Midtown though Mitteltown’s now what they’re saying, having bypassed the avenue gridlock by forsaking the tar for the ice without lane: touring carts, chartered, not quite climatecontrolled, they keep on with their arriving in caravans, hitched streamlined in lines, queues without end — from the Oranges East and West and from Hoboken, Hackensack, Ho-Ho-Kus, and Parsippany, from Conshohocken, Philadelphia, PA, and the Main Line, Levittown, and the Five Towns, from Garden City Herself of the island Long off the island off the Island that’s His, or that was; older people lately membered into newly formed, duesed and approved Affiliated groups and otherly miscellaneous benevolent associations bylawed friendly to the cause of the revivified Semitic, with don’t doubt special interests and hidden agendas of their own, too numerous to countenance before a good hot plate of fleisch and a schlaf, piling off that drecky, fleshsplintered hay and into the frost of the streets, veins swollen to burst with their life, a lively arterial clog; and the beggars, O how it seems that all the schnorrers in die ganze welt are just showing up, having gotten drunk upon the grapevine and pooled the dribble of their remaining resources to hitch and hire rides from points near, far, and enough, genug, each with a shaky withered hand out, each wanting no nicht demanding their own pinched piece of the action, a shtickel, a schmeck, the bell’s end of the salami, the warty tip of the pickle’s nose, the pleasure of your company and of your bed with you on the floor, and your mother, your sister, she single, or if not is she kind — this being the first stop of their individual fiftyfour city tours, one city for each Shabbos, it’s scheduled, one rest apportioned for each portion of the weekly read Torah, in each city by someone else, then in another city by that someone’s brother, to board for only a meager parsha of pity, the rachmones of an emotional miser, stunted in a grunted begrudge; receiving as it’s called home hospitality, a cold breakingfast don’t worry about me, and then — pulling out, moving on; two arguing: one wanting to trade his next Genesis weekend in Oconomowoc for a Leviticusly Deuteronomous stay in another’s Rome, Syracuse, Troy, or Utica, what’s not to like about the deal, have a heart, have mine and my bad back while you’re at it; I’ve got to be Upstate next week for a Kasha Festival, to make a few inquiries about a horse, the funeral of my father-inlaw, alright, so he’s just sick if ailing and, not getting any better you should tell me what to say, whatever you want to hear.
Another fanfare, this of trombones and unison tubas laying down chords under the cantorial wash, an invocation to tears: the Nachmachen’s introduction, open to both misinterpretation and appropriate sponsorship…a prayer for winter, to begin with: Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who Commands us to Wear Layers; a prayer for the lights: Blessed Art Thy Filaments and Thy Circuitry; then a prayer for the camera: May Thou Bless and Keep the Power On, the Reels Rolling, and then can I get a final Amen for that of the action, applause: Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who hath Given us Hands and, too, the Bad Taste to Clap Them Together…Der ladders slowly up to the podium, summated upon an ambo just below the rung stars; its platform teetering precariously atop that seconding mountain, Lawleeward above the square, its triangulating grid — this gutterhuddled hosting of trash spirituality, junk religion, bum cosmology, and the markets that minister them all; he squints down over this mass, this web of streets ensnared by and ensnaring, a swarming of inscrutable flies, gnats, fleas, lice, jumbles of hairy limbs in a fractious grab and grub shot through with sudden beards, the juts of chins, the opened mouths of the trampled faithful; eruptions of shoulder and elbow and knee, begging only the breath of a glimpse. Upon that skyscraping summit, Der’s flanked by the presences of President Shade, Mayor Meir Meyer, along with his local machine, notables of the state and national electorate, pluralistic ethnic dignitaries, indiscriminate influentials, luminaries and eminences (camera depending), seated aside all five borough presidents with the Joysey governor kept standing, Attorneys and Soygens General, the City’s Comptroller, Parks Commissioner, and the Chief O’Police, starry generals, recently kashered senators, feinschmecking as fat as pockets moneystuffed, huskily cigarboned, no longer under investigation they’re holding hands (their greasy fingers, pinkies inclusive, festooned with jeweled rings) with their own personal heroes of the week, whether righteous police, fire, or emergency medical, sponsored and subsequently publicized different from last: who tried to save which Affiliated, which synagogue or school from looting, or destruction; madeup and fabulously manicured widows to the left, to the right, and on their laps, too, those who’d once upon a time intermarried the famous Affiliated, you might remember, only to survive them for fortune and infamous scandal (actresses, singers, and a memoirist of singular importance), gathered here to present Ben on this the second, firstfruited day of Shavuot, with the key to the city, which as this city lacks gates and even doors repressed within what walls surrounding and tunneldark hearts must unlock nothing much, and so its keychain, too, a plastic hunk of kitsch logomached with I Heart New York, of all things. Awaiting Ben’s keynote address: a speech vetted by both the Nachmachen and Doctor Abuya to be full of sundry thanks, appreciation and honors, distinct pleasures, acknowledgements less salutary than the undecided Shalom of a rhetoric as empty, still, as the desert — spiritual, real — is wasting: gavaged Gospel prepared especially for Him by a team of overworked speechwriters, wordwranglers, hands hired away from patronage of diversivolent political prominence, priced from the favors of Middle Eastern dictators and kings whose highflown had always been spoken plain, scripted low, then toned in a grave delivery derived from an Apocalypse whose threat these inky ghosts have spent their lives perfecting for profit, and so mocking, why not, while they’re at it; a message without a message, a platform with no leg to stand on, death by impalement upon the dull of a talkingpoint, say.